Only 11% of New Twitter Users in 2012 Are Still Tweeting

To celebrate its eighth birthday, Twitter released a nifty tool that allows users to travel back in their timelines to find the first tweet they ever sent. But here’s the thing: The first tweet is the easiest. Getting users to send follow up tweets is the hard part.

According to a forthcoming report from Twopcharts, a website that monitors Twitter account activity, about 40% of the 20 million accounts that are registered on Twitter each month send at least one tweet the month they sign up. This excludes accounts that were suspended or deleted.

By the time Twitter celebrates its ninth birthday next year, Twopcharts estimates only a quarter of those accounts will still be tweeting.

The data illustrate the difficulty in getting users to be active participants on the service, underscoring the bigger issue of user retention that has been dogging the company for years. For the uninitiated, Twitter can be a confusing service to figure out with people using a kind of foreign shorthand to converse.

While Twitter can target advertisements to users based on their interests indicated just by who they follow, the more active the users are on the service the better.

Twitter can still serve ads to passive observers who just read tweets. But the company only makes money when a user engages with the ad. That means retweeting, replying, favoriting or clicking on the ad. Twopcharts tracks retweets and replies but not favorites.

To date, about 1.5 billion Twitter accounts have been registered, according to the Amsterdam-based Twopcharts. Of these, 955 million still exist today, but only 13% have tweeted in the last 30 days. That is roughly half of the 241 million monthly active users Twitter said that it had as of the end of 2013. Twitter defines a monthly active user as an account that logs in at least once a month. It does not necessarily have to tweet anything.

Twopcharts founder Adrianus Wagemakers said that he is only able to tell when a account has tweeted something, not when it has logged in. Wagemakers monitors the unique user ID numbers assigned to each Twitter account as they are created. Wagemakers’s full report will be released the first week of April.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment, saying the company does not comment on third-party data.

Twopcharts’s data show that Twitter accounts created in more recent years are less active than the ones started by early adopters from 2006-2011. About 25% of the accounts created in 2008 are still tweeting today whereas only about 10.7% of the accounts created in 2012 are tweeting a little over a year later.

The Twopcharts report also highlights the proliferation of spam being created on the service.

Wagemakers says about half of the accounts registered in 2014 have been suspended by Twitter likely because the accounts were spam, compared to 28% in 2012. Twitter suspends accounts that exhibit spam-like behavior such as following and unfollowing other accounts in large and frequent batches. In all, roughly 500 million registered accounts have been suspended since Twitter was born, according to Wagemakers.